petroseskinder's comments

Some people definitely are. The typical reasons are some combination of (1) Subscriptions are more expensive and restrictive, (2) discovering "good" content has gotten harder, (3) fan favorite shows are getting aggressively axed.

I have. My company wanted to begin hybrid next month, while I didn’t feel comfortable doing so until January 2022. When I initially broached the subject in May/June, they weren’t accommodating so I gave my notice. (Hybrid require a big move on my part.)

Recently, they’ve pushed back return date to November at the earliest and become more accommodating, but that ship has sailed, unfortunately.

It is grounds for terminating hosting when AWS has repeatedly asked you to remove said content AND they've offered to help you migrate you off of AWS.

See court filings - https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

Or for specific sections, see https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/134916216569825280...

Is there anything about the platform that is inherently pornographic or sex work focused?

For the most part, though you need not be attractive to try.

This article provides a decent background https://medium.com/brand-origins/how-did-onlyfans-start-2355...

Indeed, they are and have been trending up for a few years now. The fashion calls it Athleisure.

> The population doesn't know better or is kept down, and the leaders do what brings money to their accounts, not to the country.

This is less the case, and it is more that Chinese spying is peanuts compared to what the West has done and continues to do.

> Suppose this wasn't the case. The news headlines would of course be "Experimental drugs being tested on minorities". That would be a PR disaster.

Interesting. When you say suppose "this" wasn't the case, what do you mean by "this?" Do you mean the neglecting minorities in medical research leading to numerous negative consequences?

From what I understand correctly, you are trying to state the negation of OP's headline. If so, it's unclear how you arrived at that specific headline. Can you walk me through your line of reasoning?

> Essentially, the drug companies can't win. People will find something to complain about.

That's quite a bleak forecast. Can you clarify what it means for drug companies to win?

From my frame of reference, the game is the political arena, and a participant (or political entity) is "winning" if they can ensure they're interests and concerns are considered and upheld. Between 1998 and 2017, Pharmaceutical/Health product industry spent 3.7 billion dollars lobbying on capitol hill [0]. Interestingly, this was the highest amount spent by any industry. Moreover, it was 1.2 billion dollars more than the next highest industry, the insurance industry. If we examine just 2016 (and 2015), we see that Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PRMA) spent 19 million on lobbying [1], up about 1 million from the prior year. PRMA represents companies in the pharmaceutical industry, i.e. Big Pharma. It was surpassed in spending by the Blue Cross, American Hospital Association, Chamber of Commerce, and National Association of Realtors.

Further down that list, we see Pfizer chipped in 9.7 million (up from 7 million in 2015), and the Biotechnology innovation organization chipped 9.2 million (up from 8.3 million in 2015).

At least to me, this doesn't seem like the behavior of someone that is eliminated from a competition. If things weren't going right, I would likely cut losses and try alternative routes, not spend more. So it suggests they are satisfied with the influence they're dollar buys. Presumably, they are able to clearly communicate their interests and concerns to the decision makers on Capitol Hill. Moreover, they are able to communicate these interests and concerns _behind closed doors_ to receptive members of _both parties._

Perhaps my thinking is faulty, but to me, it seems like they're winning, i.e. influencing policy in their favor.

> Either minorities are getting neglected, or they are being abused as lab subjects.

Can you explain why these are the only two options?

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i

[1] http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/3...

> I guess people who were born here may be more familiar with those areas.

Not really. Spent first 23 years of life there. The whole car culture killed my ability to serendipitously encounter many of these various areas.

There's a lot of baggage with "race related medical research."

At least within the US, it is currently deemed wrong think for a number of reasons.

First, how are you defining race? The current American definitions of race are imprecise and sociologically constructed. Since the founding of America, the definition of white has expanded to include various groups that were previously excluded (e.g. Polish, Irish, Jewish people, Italians, Greek) [0].

As far as black/African Americans, the current definition (one drop rule) has its limitations. Sub-saharan Africa is not a monolith. It has been found that the genetic diversity between Sub-saharan African ethnicity groups exceeds other regions of the world [1]. Even as far as physical differences, there is a noticeable physical difference between a Tutsi from Rwanda, a Luhya from Kenya, an Amhara from Ethiopia, and a Yoruba from Nigeria. A very noticeable difference. I can't speak for their "genetic difference." However, it's large enough to warrant further investigation on what categories are used. This distinction is important moving forward. Since 1970, voluntary immigration from Africa has surged from the aforementioned regions [2], with many becoming first, and second generation Americans [3], the current racial assumptions and definitions are a tad archaic.

This is just one racial group within the US. I didn't really even mention how ludicrous bucketing 60% of the world's population as "Asian" is.

Second, and most importantly, the US does not have a great track record with biological research targeting black people, Native Americans, and other minority groups. There is a long history of medical abuse where researchers conduct experiments without the knowledge or consent of black patients. A few notable examples in recent history are the Tuskagee Syphilis Experiments between 1932 and 1972 [3] and DoD's non-consensual whole body radiation experiments on black cancer patients between 1960 and 1971 [4][5]. Even today, this sort of non-consensual racial medical experimentation has not stopped. As recently as 2013, Ethiopian Jews (immigrating from Ethiopia) in Israel were coerced into agreeing to injections of long acting birth control drugs by Israeli medical officials [6]. The apprehension is very much justified.

> If everyone is the same, why bother with diverse studies?

You're tone suggests that you don't understand why people are "dancing" around the subject and trying to be politically correct or whatever. I am under the impression that the American medical research community has, through its actions, fostered distrust in "racial" based medical research. Now, it's stuck in a bind, as a direct consequence of its actions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...

[1] cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/6/7/a008524.full

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/14/african-immi...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn-t-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/health/23book.html

[6] https://goo.gl/BbpdhX

[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-...

On a similar note, the Student Cluster Competition at SC'17 makes use of a reproducibility challenge, where teams are expected to reproduce the results of a selected paper [0]. This year it's the Vectorization of the Tersoff Multi-body Potential [1]. Overall, teams are expected to read the paper, figure out what the claims are, try to reproduce the results on a cluster your team built, and then analyze the final results.

As a student participating in this challenge, I can say that the challenge has been a really fun and illuminating experience. It's given me the chance to deep dive into some computer architecture (vectorization, intrinsics, etc), and also get some basic exposure in molecular body simulations.

> An unexpected outcome of this project is an increased role of students in the networking research community.

This is in line with my experiences, as well. One challenge we faced was that the specific paper experimented exclusively on Intel clusters, whereas we were running a Power machine. Since they hosted their optimizations on Github, we were able to create issues when we had challenges porting to our machine (which we quickly resolved).

All in, a really fun experience. I think this "reproducing canonical papers" would be a fun and hands on way to learn about a new field.

That said, I do question the feasibility of this as a pedagogical approach. We were able to "luck" out because (1) the paper's author, Markus, had to compete to have his paper published, and (2) he was very helpful, (porting the code to Power, answering followup questions, etc.) In a sense, this was "easy" mode. However, there are a number of cases where it's simply building a paper's code is nontrivial. For example, a few researchers at Arizona tried to simply obtain and build the code of 613 papers from ASPLOS’12, CCS’12, OOPSLA’12, OSDI’12, PLDI’12, SIGMOD’12, SOSP’11, VLDB’12, TACO’9, TISSEC’15, TOCS’30, TODS’37, TOPLAS’34 [2]. Of these 613 papers, they had a ~25% success rate, where success means they were able to build and get a basic run.

[0]http://www.studentclustercompetition.us/2017/applications.ht...

[1]https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3014914

[2]http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/tr.pdf

That's fair. Whenever I think of dependencies, I imagine conflicts are fair game.

The problem of resolving a set of dependencies is actually NP complete. One can reduce the SATISFIABILITY problem to it. Russ Cox provides a good introduction to the problem [1,2]

What's challenging about dependency resolution is handling the versioning constraints. For example, you may state that your project is dependent on the following packages {"A:1.0", "B:[2.0,)", "C:3.2"}. Resolving a dependency is simply selecting one version of each package. At first glance this is easy. However, you need to consider the transitive dependencies of each package. Meaning, A:1.0 will have set of dependencies you need to resolve. Then B:2.0, B:2.1, etc will have their own set of dependencies. In some cases you may find that there is simply no means to resolve the dependencies.

For example, if A:1.0 depended on C:2.1, there would be no way to resolve your transitive dependency graph.

Currently, most package managers use a heuristic based backtracking approach. However, there has been a recent push to using SAT solvers. It's a fascinating and messy area.

[1] https://research.swtch.com/version-sat

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167446

At least at the major companies I have worked at (n=3), GPL is to be avoided, if at all possible. LGPL, to a lesser extent. The general impression I received was that it was cancerous.

One thing to note about Ballmer's tenure is that Microsoft's stock tanked. That doesn't seem to be the case with Cook.